National Minority Golf Foundation
Being the golf website for everyone we had to let you know about this touching story. We’re always up for people goving golf a good name and promoting this noble sport of ours to the masses so good work NMGF, keep it up.
“They toasted the engagement in a Miami bar. John Merchant (pictured above) sipped a Bombay gin martini, straight up, extra dry with a twist. He rose, a triumphant smile on his face, shook hands with Bill Dickey and embraced Roy Richie.
The threesome, among the most influential black men in golf, had just agreed to create the National Minority Golf Foundation. Four years of industry meetings and tireless lobbying finally had yielded this: The birth of an independent organization committed to diversity in the sport, and perhaps more important, in the golf workforce.
“We really did believe that something could change, and we could make a permanent difference,” remembers Richie, of that momentous occasion in October 1995.
Richie, who became chairman of the NMGF board, was the matchmaker. His plan was to marry the efforts of Dickey – a retired real estate and insurance salesman who single-handedly had supported minority golfers through his National Minority Junior Golf Scholarship Association – and those of Merchant, a U.S. Golf Association Executive Committee member who had championed the diversity cause and would become the NMGF’s executive director.
Richie filed for the NMGF’s nonprofit status on Dec. 26, 1995. A bureaucratic ordeal that usually takes three to four months ended inexplicably with an approval the following day. “I must’ve found the only minority golfer in the IRS to review it,” Richie jokes. “It was extraordinary, and I think unprecedented”...
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Golf News
10/9/2007 7:21:52 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) 
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